This book is well-written and, with the inclusion of words of Atlanta residents who experienced the ordeal of their city's destruction, brings this part of the Civil War to life.

Jamie dreams of travel, the girl of his dreams and a son who speaks the ancient Irish language. Through his persistance and against all odds, all his wishes come true. Excellent character development of Jamie and his mentor/nemesis Tavish.

This book is from the AJC in Atlanta. It's quotes of Atlanta drivers, professionals, sports fans etc. They are some of the funniest one liners you'll see. Even if you cant relate to traffic in Atlanta or the sorry sports teams you'll still get it and love it.

This is an excellent book reviewing the battles that took place from Chattanooga to Atlanta in the summer of 1864 in the Western armies. The authors, working independently, have chronicled much of the strategy and and battlefield drama that characterized such engagements as Dallas, New Hope Church, Pickett's Mill, Kennesaw Mountain, Ezra Church, Resaca etc.
As a layman, I was not bogged down with too much military lingo, and was able to get a good grasp of the strategy used on both sides. Maps and pictures add to the clarity. The authors seemed to start out being favorably disposed to Joseph E. Johnston's command, then, as they analyze all the historical and geographical factors from hindsight, they bring the reader to wonder at his failure to maneuver into a decisive victory over Sherman's advancing army. With the ensuing command of Gen. Hood one senses the nearly frantic contrast to throw men into battle as Atlanta becomes ever-more threatened, at great sacrifice of Confederate lives.
If you had ancestors that fought in the Atlanta Campaign, this is a very good book, with details drawn from numerous sources. The writers have added soldiers' and officers' comments from diaries and letters that detail the morale, the terrain, the weather, and attitude towards the events of the day. These add more interest to the sometimes dry, official commentaries so often quoted in other works.
Good history for layman or scholar; Union or Confederate.

Atlantans like to eat out often (an average of 3.4 times a week) and, in greater Atlanta, there is a plethora of restaurants to choose from. Zagat Surveys are designed to save diners time (and disappointment) by helping you select the best place to feast.

I have used Zagat Surveys for years and have found them to be up to date and reliable in their critical evaluation of a restaurant's food, ambiance and service. Scoring 1-30 in each category (food, decor, service) a restaurant's top score in each category can be 30. The Ritz-Carlton Dining Room, Buckhead scored 28, 27, 27 . . . the highest score in Atlanta. The remaining 449 restaurants in this guide have a flagship to follow. One of the most useful features is the guide's "Top Rating" sections: Top Food by Cuisine, Best Buys, Most Popular, Top Outdoor, Top Romantic, Top Views etc.

This is a very good pocket guide and if there is a downside it is the lack of maps. Two small maps are what you get to cover 450 restaurants, actually these two maps only list the 40 most popular restaurants. Another area that may disappoint some is the terse 50 word description for each restaurant, a brief narrative that fails to mention any outstanding restaurant dishes. If you are looking for a fuller restaurant description, I commend the "Atlanta Restaurant Guide" by Christiane Lauterbach. Though dated (1996) it is a good guide to also have (both are guides used together would be best). Zagat has been, and is, the best overall dining guide for Atlanta. Recommended!

Hundreds of Restaurants populate Atlanta. This compact guide is greatly needed to whittle down the selection. Often used to help select the best, I have found the Zagatsurvey to accurately guide me to the best cusine that Atlanta has to offer.

The 2002/03 edition has 95% of the best restaurants in Atlanta (when compared against the culture Atlanta magazine "Jezebel" in their July '100 Best Restaurants of 2002' edition). Scoring 1-30 in each category (food, decor, service) a restaurant's top score in each category can be 30. The Ritz-Carlton Dining Room, Buckhead scored 28, 27, 28 . . . the highest score in Atlanta. The remaining 449 restaurants in this guide have a flagship to follow.

One of the most useful features is the guide's "Top Rating" sections: Top Food by Cuisine, Best Buys, Most Popular, Top Outdoor, Top Romantic, Top Views, etc.

This is a very good pocket guide and, if there is a downside, it is the lack of maps. Two small maps are what you get to cover 450 restaurants. Actually, these two maps only list the 42 most popular restaurants. Another area that may disappoint some is the terse 50 word description for each restaurant, a brief narrative that fails to mention any outstanding restaurant dishes.

If you are looking for a fuller restaurant description, I commend the "Atlanta Restaurant Guide" by Christiane Lauterbach. Though dated (1996), it is a good guide to also have, but both are guides used together would be best. Zagat has been, and is, the best overall dining guide for Atlanta. Recommended!

Boy the reader from "fashionable Washington, D.C." hit the nail right on the head. This book is definitely for the over 60 crowd. Vincent's fawning prose over his "It Girls" of today were funny and puzzling. Kathie Lee Gifford? Claire Shipman? Liz Smith? These women often look like they need grooming tips and a good bath. Others like Julia Ormond, Adrienne Vittadini, Isabella Rossellini, or Nina Griscom do indeed have that extra something, but Vincent didn't really manage to define it. The tips on dressing were okay, but nothing that most mothers haven't already taught their daughters. The only real thing that elevates this book and makes it partially worthwhile, is that Vincent is donating his portion of the profits to charity. Next time either he or Sherry Suib Cohen write a book, they should also scan the pages for really glaring glamour discrepencies, like showing Diane Sawyer's or Phyllis George's fillings, either edit them out or have these women close their mouths. I also think that the women presented seemed like mindless sheep, and that their cities and fashion codes which they live by were stereotyped and parodied. While this book is an okay general guide to give the reader a feel for how a certain portion of the population looks and dresses, I'd recommend watching CNN Style, or Fashion File and simply paying attention.

This is a wonderful book with practical advice on how to get that polished look that most women covet. An added perk is getting the chance to peak into the world of celebrity--the author provides interesting tidbits of information about favorite celebrities with lovely pictures to match. This would be a wonderful gift.

I bought this book for my mom and my daughter--I'm in the sandwich generatyion! It's funny and fabulous and informative and I've never quite seen a beauty book like it! It;s actually a style book--a strong, directional look at the way the stunning women get the big city look. I got it!

This is the first book I read from Anne Rivers Siddons. I had just moved to Atlanta, and I had heard that this author also lived in Atlanta and that all her novels were based in the South.

I enjoyed reading this novel, not only because I was familiar with most of the places described in the book, but also because I liked very much the style the author uses to describe the characters, their emotions.

Suffice to say, I was totally "hooked" and I have read almost all of her books.

This is the first book I've read by Siddons and I've just finished reading it for the second time tonight. I have to say I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time, even with knowing the "surprise" ending. The characters were loveable, the hate-able ones immensely so. Her descriptions of the south during this particular point in history was fascinating, the book a true page turner. I couldn't put it down! Perhaps I'm just a young idealist with low standards but I found Smoky (the heroin, as it were) to be refreshing (if a little unbelievably naive, but hey I didn't grow up in a strict Irish Catholic home in the sixties so i really wouldn't know)and I found myself relating to her on many different levels. I laughed right out loud and often cried with the characters. I can't wait to read more!

I've read a few of Anne Rivers Siddons books so far, and they were mostly light reading, the story of a woman who has some issues and then seeks to resolve them. But Downtown is a different and more complicated book. This book details many of the civil movements in the 60s like the Vietnam war, the African-American quest for equality, and the changing of society. The different types of characters in this book are fascinating, from the upper crust society types to the people living in projects and slums. The narrator, Smoky, is a sort of tabula rasa, a blank slate who records many of the changes around her, as she herself changes. Not having lived through this period in history, I found that reading this book gave me a lot of insight into the lives of people in the 60s. It was a very engaging read and I would highly recommend it. And the ending is somewhat surprising, which should keep you tuned in until the last page.

I am dumbfounded by the overly critical nature of some of other readers reviews of what is another Tom Wolfe masterpiece. Many appear to fail to grasp the book's central premise, of the intersection of two men: One who has nothing but his character, and another who has everything except his character, kept me engaged throughout. Having lived in Contra Costa County and worked a large bank like the mythical PlannersBanc, my perspective is that the attention to detail was spot on. Without boring the reader with unnecessary accounting and technospeak, Wolfe captures the essence of how many American businessmen and bankers view the world. The multi-page setting of the scene for Chapter 2's workout sessions placed the reader precisely in the room. I've been in workout sessions, and while Wolfe's is an exaggeration of my experience, I have no doubt that many workouts have been that ugly. The minor inaccuracies (e.g., El Cerrito is rarely as warm as Wolfe describes, nor is it on the approach to Oakland International Airport; there is no bay near San Francisco named "East Bay") did not distract from the picture painted. No doubt he was off a bit on Atlanta, too, but like most readers I couldn't notice.

While I, too, was unsatisfied with the anticlimatic ending, the "spark of Zeus" nevertheless prevailed throughout this classic.

Well, let's see. Three years to finally buy the book, four days to read it. Overall an entertaining story but the ending, well, it just sort of . . . ended. Would like to have heard (or read, actually) a bit more from the characters themselves at the end. Odd twist about who made whom a Zeusian. (Probably would have worked better to have people realize the connection between Conrad and Croker but that would have been too mundane I guess,) As a now-former banker, I liked both Bonfire and this one because I can relate to the "business" at hand. And yes, Peepgass and Zale were right, it sure is easy to get sucked into the big deals and start thinking you're "one of them" (been there, did that, got chewed out for it, but never lost $150 million. $3 million, sure, but never 150). And I didn't even mind the little errors about the near-to-me San Francisco Bay, which Wolfe took a lot of unnecessary heat for. Just as long as he didn't call them the "Oakland" 49ers or the "Oakland" Giants.

Tom Wolfe's scanning, tunneling vision and rye humour has targeted the cultural landscape for four decades now. ' A Man in Full' cuts a broad swath through America of the 1990's. It uses the same template as his novel of a decade ago, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. A rainbow of American success stories in progress converge into an irreconcilable destiny. Something must give and does. The motivating ideal of the protagonist here is a more primal force, however. The self made 'Southern Man', this 'noble' anachronism, as opposed to the insipid Wall Street Yuppie of Bonfire. The social forces on which the characters ride are more elemental, a clash of plate tectonics on a molten core of hubris. There's little subtlety in Wolfe's symbolisms or descriptions of the shallow pretensions in this cultural wasteland.

I am keenly aware when I read Wolfe that I am not reading literature. This is sheer indulgence! This is a soap opera. Finely and skillfully wrought, no doubt, but still a social circus of over bred egos and under bred moral sense. 'A Man in Full's' characters are brought to the material abyss through pride, lust, avarice and envy. These are surface dwellers, arrivistes without an appreciation of proportion and self restraint. They seek nothing deeper or more meaningful in their lives than an escalation up another rung on the social ladder. It's hard to like most of these people but dramatic personalities of this type are not made to be likable. It can still be a little overwrought at times. There is no stasis in Tom Wolfe's work, no get along and go along. All the protagonists are gladiators in the forum, everyone has an agenda, which leads to raucous, hilarious and even heroic results when put in the context of an elegant gallery benefit, a thoroughbred stud session, or a violent prison pod.

The sustaining philosophical undercurrent here is the Stoic creed of Epictetus. It is a philosophy of resolve and assertion of self dignity in the face of persecution, humiliation and defeat. It is the actualisation of this essential man which Wolfe uses as a contrast to the material and social accouterments by which Charles Croker and company have defined themselves. The episode of palpable terror and self affirmation in the prison pod is as powerful as anything written in contemporary fiction

If there is a problem with this book, it's that it's finely honed characters and situations and it's excellent writing are thread together by a somewhat tenuous and implausible story line. Sometimes it seems as though Wolfe threw it together as an afterthought to frame his comic, social and character essays, of which he is the modern master. I wrestled with giving it four stars on this basis, but the compensating strengths are too compelling.

I'm not sure quite what to make of the ending. As usual Wolfe ties up all the loose ends in an epilogue which can leave you wondering 'what's the point?'. To Wolfe's credit he does not provide happy endings or poetic justice. Charlie Croker and Sherman McCoy are joined at a point when their 'tragic flaws' and superficiality are becoming dimly evident even to themselves. We leave them in the detritus of their unraveled lives. The character's final dissolution is left unresolved. They seem to become aware of an inner self, though, brought to a point where they might even be developing some character. Something only they need understand. The rest of the world goes along merrily as if none of this had happened.

When I finish a book like this I feel like I've been to a feast where I've indulged myself a bit too much. In 100 years Tom Wolfe will be mainly of interest to social historians, as locked as his books are to this day and age. But on the off chance that they are studying Wolfe in lit classes, 'A Man in Full' should regarded as a masterpiece of journalistic fiction.

unless one likes reticient women who are constantly in denial, this book can prove frustrating. I am a die-hard Sandra Brown fan, but Megan really startedto annoy me as she had a man who would do anything for her and put up with a lot of rubbish from her. Somewhat reminicent of Linda Howard's All that Glitters which also had an annoying heroine.

The library at my school has that book. It's been favorite book since I read it for the first time. I love the plot and characters. I also think the love scenes are excellent. Sandra Brown is truly an amazing writer.

I love this book! I've read many of Sandra Brown's novels and this is a fantastic one. I think the story line and characters are extremely realistic. I couldn't put the book down and read all night until I reached the end. I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not completely falling in love with Josh and having a true understanding for Megan and her feelings. It was FANTASTIC!